AdMob: Android Passes iPhone In Mobile Web Traffic

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The iPhone was the first smartphone that really made web surfing on a phone tolerable. It’s been the king in mobile web traffic based on usage until now. AdMob is reporting that their ads are now seen on more Android devices than iPhone devices for the month of March 2010.

A few disclaimers – AdMob admittedly isn’t an perfect way of measuring mobile web traffic, but it’s one of the few sources that we have. Secondly, Google recently bought AdMob, but as AndroidandMe reports, the deal isn’t finished and the US Federal Trade Commission looks like they’re going to try to block the acquisition. I doubt that AdMob is cooking the books to make Google’s Android look better – though I’m sure a few tinfoil types will believe so.

In March 2010, Android made up 46% of US smartphone web traffic, while the iPhone OS continued it’s steady decline and slipped it only 39%. That was expected for sometime – not only has Android been gaining on the iPhone OS for a while, multiple manufacturers are producing Android phones, while only one – Apple – is producing iPhones.

A few interesting notes from AdMob though: The Motorola Droid is the most popular Android phone based on traffic, making up 32% of traffic. The Nexus One (widely considered to be the current ‘best’ Android phone), only made up 2% of Android traffic in March 2010. In September 2009, two devices (HTC Dream and HTC Magic) made up a combined 96% of Android web traffic. In March 2010, a whopping 11 devices made up 96%.

Note that these numbers are from March 2010. A pretty big iPhone OS device (it’s called the iPad, you may have heard of it) came out in early April. It will be interesting to see if AdMob counts the iPad in it’s traffic number – and if so, what effect it has on the Android-iPhone race.

Another thing to watch in the future – the cost of these devices. The iPhone and a lot of these Android phones (the good ones, anyway) are expensive as far as phones go. At CTIA and CES this year, we saw a lot of companies (Texas Instruments, ST-Ericsson) discussing SoC hardware with the intent of a cheap (sub-$100) Android phone. Cheap hardware could even help further the growth of Android.